Paywall Changes at the NY Times: The Number of Free Articles Available to Non-Subscribers Cut by 50%

The New York Times Media Group announced today that as of Sunday, March 18, one year after launching paid digital subscriptions, it had approximately 454,000 paid subscribers to its various digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (IHT).

The Times also announced that beginning in April it would be moving the pay gate at NYTimes.com to 10 free articles a month from 20. With this change, The Times’s digital subscription plan will continue to allow for access to a generous amount of free content on the Web site and across multiple digital platforms.

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Beginning in April, all users of NYTimes.com will be able to enjoy 10 articles at no charge each month (including slideshows, videos and other forms of content). Beyond 10 articles and for unlimited accessto the site, users will be asked to become digital subscribers.

On The Times’s smartphone and tablet applications, the Top News sections will remain free. To delve deeper into the apps’ other sections, users will be asked to become digital subscribers.

[Our Emphasis] Readers who come to Times articles through links from e-mail, search, blogs and social media will continue to be able to access those individual articles, even if they have reached their reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of five free links to Times articles.

Notes

1. Of course, many libraries offer free access to databases (24×7 remote access) containing both current and historic NY Times material.
Here’s yet another reason to market these services.

2. Plenty of bookmarklets and add-ones are available to bypass any paywall limit. No word if the NYT will work to stop these tools. They’ve been online for the past year. Here’s are a few examples of what were talking about via Lifehacker.

3. As The Times makes clear access to articles without hitting a paywall limit can be accessed if you use social media or a search engine.

So, a search like site:nytimes.com {search terms} will work on both Bing and Google.

There are a number of Twitter streams that tweet NY Times articles. Two examples are @freeTimes and NYTimes4Fre

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